Years ago, I heard a passage from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass on Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast. It was in episode 68, “Human Resources.” What impressed me was not only its power and eloquence, but the difficulty Douglass had in writing it. It’s difficult to write about atrocities in elegant prose. It’s especially difficult for someone who was not only a witness to but a victim of such violence. Here’s the passage Carlin read:
“I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember any thing. It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it.”
On the basis of that passage, I was determined to read the book. A couple of years went by and, due to literature being strewn around like so much trash, my wife found a copy on the street and dropped it on my desk. It was the Bedford/St. Martin’s edition and had a long Introduction by David W. Blight, professor of something or other. I stuck with Prof. Blight until he claimed that Douglass “fits squarely” into the tradition of the jeremiad. A jeremiad is a kind of prolonged lamentation or invective condemning society’s ills and prophesying its ultimate downfall. From the above passage, I didn’t see how Douglass fit into that tradition or, at least, not squarely into it. So I bounced to the first chapter and started reading the text.
I found no lamentation, invective or invocation of hellfire and brimstone. No warning of impending doom. No messianic return from the desert wastes with a vision. No call upon Yaweh to smite the tribe with diseases, swarms, floods and fiery rain. What I found was a firsthand account of the conditions under which American slaves lived in the South, as told by one who was born under and had escaped those conditions. As far as format was concerned, the book reminded me more of the bildungsroman, a “formation novel,” which chronicles an individual’s struggles and ultimate fulfillment. Think David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Portrait of the Artist, Harry Potter, etc.
As a narrator, contrary to Prof. Blight’s suggestion, I found Douglass to be anything but “pious.” He impressed me as more of a secular than a sacred kind of guy. His style reminded me of Edward Gibbon’s in its use of symmetrical and parallel phrasing, but with a greater economy. As a thinker, he seems to have been informed by the Enlightenment humanists—Johnson, Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc.—and owed little to the Great Awakening, that religious fervor of colonial America which made the jeremiad so popular.
Other than briefly thanking God for his luck and the sustained hope of gaining his liberty, Douglass had little praise for Christianity. So little, in fact, that he was obliged to add an Appendix to dispel the charge that he was “an opponent of all religion” and to “remove the liability of such misapprehension.” He states that his characterization of religion is “strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper.” That said, the Appendix wastes no time in returning to the original indictment: “I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection.”
Throughout the Narrative, “pious” practitioners of that religion occur with a frequency equal to the beatings and privations they inflict. Over and over Douglass shows that religion and the atrocities of slavery go hand in hand. He masterfully personifies the institution of slavery in the individuals he describes: “Mr. Gore was proud, ambitious, and persevering. He was artful, cruel, and obdurate. He was just the man for such a place, and it was just the place for such a man. It afforded scope for the full exercise of all his powers, and he seemed to be perfectly at home in it. . . . He was just proud enough to demand the most debasing homage of the slave, and quite servile enough to crouch, himself, at the feet of the master. He was ambitious enough to be contented with nothing short of the highest rank of overseers, and persevering enough to reach the height of his ambition. He was cruel enough to inflict the severest punishment, artful enough to descend to the lowest trickery, and obdurate enough to be insensible to the voice of a reproving conscience. . . . His savage barbarity was equaled only by the consummate coolness with which he committed the grossest and most savage deeds upon the slaves under his charge.”
After that dissection of the overseer, Douglass describes an incident in which Mr. Gore shoots an elderly slave point blank in the face with a musket, blowing his brains into the river, simply because the man refused to leave the water and voluntarily receive a flogging. “Mr. Gore told him that he would give him three calls, and that, if he did not come out at the third call, he would shoot him. The first call was given. Demby made no response, but stood his ground. The second and third calls were given with the same result. Mr. Gore then, without consultation or deliberation with any one, not even giving Demby an additional call, raised his musket to his face, taking deadly aim at his standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more. His mangled body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he had stood.”
Douglass describes such atrocities in a prose that is clean, elegant and devoid of ornament or pretense. His voice is candid and direct. He doesn’t rub his erudition (which he had a good deal of) in your face. He doesn’t refer to literary influences, draw historical parallels or reason aloud. He relies entirely on the power of the facts, the actual events to which he bore witness and was subject. His thoughts and feelings are at one with the experience that gives rise to them. And what he loses in exaggeration, he gains in veracity.
With a steady hand, Douglass guides his readers through a lived experience that, while grim, is infused with hope. In this, he is the precursor to a slew of first-person fictional narratives—from David Copperfield to Catcher in the Rye to Ham on Rye—in which the author looks back on the adversities from which he or she has escaped.
When Douglass wrote this book, the autobiographical account of a slave becoming a free man was not new. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, published in London in 1789, was an obvious influence. In that staple of abolitionist literature, a former slave, Equiano, tells of his enslavement as a child and his passage to freedom, starting in what is now Nigeria and ending in London. He describes his travels throughout the Americas, Great Britain and the West Indies. Unlike Equiano, Douglass gives little attention to his state as a free man and focuses on the physical and psychological privations of slavery.
Douglass has an inward focus that is characteristic of the great autobiographical “confessions,” such as those by Augustine and Rousseau. But there is something more modern in its indictment of a specific institution and the psychological effect of it. The Narrative reminds me of Victor Frankl’s autobiographical account of surviving a Nazi concentration camp, Man’s Search for Meaning, in that he focuses on the state of mind it takes to survive an institution that attempts to deny a person freedom, agency, intelligence and humanity. Like Frankl, he asserts that a future, or hope, was essential to staying alive: “but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I should have killed myself, or done something for which I should have been killed.” And, like Frankl, it is learning, the search for meaning and stoic management of what is under his control, that shows him the way out.
Douglass’s thoughts on slavery and freedom emerge naturally in the course of events, as they should in a man whose experience preceded his learning. His path to literacy and enlightenment progresses and falters as impediments give way and arise. Denied a legitimate education, he steals his way to learning. Opportunistic as any thief, he employs the neighborhood kids to help him. He finds his reading material and reading time on the streets of Baltimore. And when he achieves literacy, it comes at the cost of consciousness: “I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible, but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast.”
Throughout the book, literacy and slavery are at odds: “The more I read, the more I learned to detest and abhor my enslavers.” His determination to read is initially conceived as an act of opposition, when he overhears his master urging his wife to keep him ignorant: “The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. It gave me the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read. What he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn.”
To my knowledge, there’s no account of a slave’s experience in all of literature that surpasses the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Nor is there a better argument against an institution that would turn people into chattel. Most of all, the book, though small in scope, is so well written and thoroughly conceived that it carries the symbolic, rational and historic heft of the great Enlightenment literature that inspired Douglass.
Though slavery may now seem an anachronism, though humans may no longer seem to be sufficiently depraved to turn their fellow humans into a labor asset, its legacy lives on in ways more subtle and insidious. People are still denied an education to keep them “shut up in mental darkness,” as Douglass put it. People are still encouraged to glut and inebriate themselves as a way “to disgust the slave with freedom, by allowing him to see only the abuse of it.” A couple of weeks ago, the Patriot Front marched on Kansas City to assert the idea that America should be exclusively inhabited by people of white, European Christian descent. While slavery is no longer in practice, the fraudulent ideology of priority, supremacy and sanctity is making a comeback. The very religion of the south descried by Douglass prevails in our highest courts.
The cruelty that would treat people like “a chattel personal” is exercised by our country’s highest executive. The same executive who, in 2017, betrayed his ignorance by saying of Frederick Douglass, “I hear he’s doing a great job.”